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When I drink Kikkoman 100% naturally brewed soy sauce, my heart disease no more. Unless I drink a litre of it, in which case I fall into a sodium overdose coma and die. Moderation is key, there can be too much of a good thing, and so on and so forth.

A college kid in Virginia, USA, drank a liter (that's roughly a quart) of soy sauce as part of the initiation ritual slash hazing slash display of ritual idiocy at one of the fraternities of the University of Virginia. The sheer amount of salt he ingested sent him into a salt coma. The whole thing happened in 2011, but regained notoriety recently as juicy (hah) details of the case surfaced in an article by The Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Hypernatremia, salt overdose, is dangerous because it causes the brain to lose water. When there is too much salt in the bloodstream, water moves out of the body tissues and into the blood by the process of osmosis, to try to equalize the salt concentration between the two. As water the leaves the brain, the organ can shrink and bleed.

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Relax, this is only 95% of the lethal dose.​

He was rushed to the hospital, and saved by pumping 6 liters (1.5 gallons) of glucose solution to dilute the salt in his bloodstream. He stayed in a coma for three days. According to The Journal of Emergency Medicine, he is the first person known to survive such a massive concentration of sodium without suffering permanent brain damage. No brain damage as far as they know; I'd say he was pretty brain damaged in the first place. Previous recorded cases of salt overdose of this magnitude either resulted in severe brain damage, or death. The recovery is attributed to the fast and aggressive treatment by the medical team, that resulted in a faster hydration of the brain.

Following an investigation of the case, the fraternity where this took place had been ordered to shut down for two years.

Interesting tidbit: in ancient China, nobles would commit suicide by eating a pound of salt. Another interesting tidbit: in the 1960s and '70s, doctors used to give salt to patients suffering from poisoning. Fortunately, science marches on.